Melbourne's war on duplicate images in public spaces: how the city stacks up against Amsterdam, Seoul and Toronto

Melbourne's network of local councils and state-funded cultural bodies has begun a structured push to eliminate duplicate imagery from public-facing infrastructure — a quiet but resource-intensive effort that touches everything from wayfinding signage along Swanston Street to rotating digital displays inside the Melbourne Museum on Nicholson Street, Carlton. The effort, which picked up pace in the first half of 2026, reflects a broader reckoning cities are having with visual redundancy as digital asset management becomes a core function of public administration.

The issue matters now because cities are managing more visual content than at any previous point — across social media, internal systems, physical signage and digital screens — and duplicated images carry real costs. Storage fees compound, licensing disputes arise when the same third-party photograph appears in multiple municipal contexts without separate clearance, and public art programs are increasingly scrutinised for whether new commissions offer genuinely original work. In a city that bills itself as Australia's arts capital, the reputational stakes are real.

What Melbourne is actually doing

The City of Melbourne's Creative Programs team, which oversees public art and the This Way Up wayfinding initiative in the CBD, has been integrating a digital asset management system since late 2025 to flag duplicate and near-duplicate image files before they reach production. The program applies to physical streetscape rollouts — including hoarding panels along the State Library of Victoria precinct on La Trobe Street — as well as digital content published to council-managed screens in Federation Square.

The Victorian Department of Creative Industries has separately been funding image audits across state-owned venue portfolios, including the Arts Centre Melbourne on St Kilda Road. That audit, which began in February 2026, is part of a wider digital infrastructure review rather than a standalone project. The rationale is partly financial: cloud storage for government agencies in Victoria is billed under whole-of-government contracts, and redundant image libraries inflate those costs over time.

Outer suburban councils are less advanced. Moreland — now operating as Merri-bek City Council — and Banyule City Council have both flagged digital asset rationalisation as a goal in their respective 2025–2026 operational plans, but neither has yet completed a full image audit of public-facing assets according to publicly available council documents. The gap between inner-city and outer-suburban implementation is a pattern that shows up in comparable cities too.

How Melbourne compares globally

Amsterdam's municipal government completed a city-wide duplicate image audit of its public communications archive in 2024, cutting its active image library by an estimated 34 percent and reducing associated cloud costs. Seoul's Smart City Division has built automated deduplication into its real-time urban display network since 2023, a system that covers more than 800 digital panels across the city. Toronto, operating under its Open Government initiative, published a duplicate-content reduction framework in March 2025 that required all city departments to certify clean image libraries before any new digital signage contract could be awarded.

Melbourne has no equivalent city-wide mandate. The work is happening department by department and council by council, which industry observers say produces uneven results. Without a central policy, duplicate images slip through when teams use separate procurement channels — a particular problem in a city where public art commissions, public health messaging and transport signage are managed by entirely different agencies with no shared asset platform.

The City of Melbourne covers only the CBD and inner suburbs. Thirty-one other local government areas share the broader metropolitan region, and coordination between them on something as unglamorous as image-file management is limited at best.

For Melburnians, the practical consequence is mostly invisible — duplicate wayfinding images don't cause accidents, and repeated photographs in council brochures don't erode services. But for the agencies and councils spending money on it, the inefficiency is real and growing as content volumes rise. The cities that have moved fastest — Amsterdam and Seoul in particular — did so after commissioning independent audits that put a dollar figure on the problem. Melbourne hasn't done that yet at scale, and until it does, the patchwork approach is likely to continue.